“We’re going to have to quarantine the entire region” was what the guy from the CDC said, out of nowhere, the one with scrofula. Like he’d come in from the scrub to say just this, shouting above the engorgement of the luncheoneers, shouting above expressions of animal contentment, suppressed belches, and, in one or two cases, a disguised postprandial nap. “There’s no other alternative. And that’s assuming that we haven’t already missed a number of people who have been exposed and who are already on jets heading to other parts of the country or even around the globe. Quarantine is the human approach, the reasonable approach, and it should begin as soon as possible.”
“What’s the unreasonable approach?”
It became clear, as always in these high-level meetings, that rumor and innuendo had spawned a range of dire narratives, and it became the job of Leona — as an assortment of melon-flavored sorbets was served — to digest the story as she understood it, for the discussants. In the course of this, she called on Gibraltar to lend a hand with the backstory.
“Look,” he said, upon breaking into a shame-enriched recital, “I’m aware that there are people in my department who bungled the Mars mission. The Mars mission, in the end, did not do as it was supposed to do, except insofar as it spawned a popular reality-based web program, and I’m aware, in the underfunded present, that we’ve had a number of missions in the last couple of decades that haven’t really displayed us to advantage. But before we get sidetracked talking about how we botched the mission and it’s all our fault, and before I observe that it was business and the military that wanted that onboard bacteria in the first place, I want to remind you, ladies and gentlemen, what the dream of space travel means. The dream of space travel. The dream of the voyage into the heavens. It really isn’t terribly different from our narrative of westward expansion, when you think about it. Manifest Destiny is a blot on our national reputation. How we conducted the westward expansion doesn’t make us any nobler in the eyes of history, and yet the dream of expansion does represent some kind of fervent hope, some kind of very human wish. The movement outward from the past brings with it the capacity to renew and restore a belief in a common purpose. It celebrates our ingenuity, and our capacity to start over. That’s what the dream of space travel is all about. That’s what Mars was all about. I know that there are some of you who think that Mars was just applying a swift kick in the ass to the Chinese and the Indians out at the edge of the universe, or about creating new economic opportunities while things were getting bad for us here, but I think that’s a lot of bunk. Mars was about proving that even in the worst times we could still dream big, and that the big dreams made us better, made us more responsible, more upright, and they brought us back to Earth rededicated to the purpose of human civilization.
“Now, we lost a number of our people up there, and we recently made the decision that we were going to stand by our returning guy as he tried to reunite with his friends and family. We had no real intel about that strain of bacteria on Mars, the one that took so many of our people, and we had no way of knowing that it could outlast the very high temperatures of reentry and the explosion of the capsule. We’re not in the bioweapons business. But because we weaponized the bacteria in the course of our mission, it became our problem first, and so we’re the lead agency, at least for the moment. Indeed, what we found that we were dealing with was unpredictable, dangerous, even lethal,” Gibraltar said, warming to his rhetorical flights, as he always did when the stakes were highest, “but doesn’t that give us an opportunity? Just a year or so ago, people had all these ideas about terraforming Mars, as if that were something we could do in the near term, not something that would take hundreds of years. Now, I want to believe that terraforming can be accomplished, and more, but what I really think is that the challenge we face before us, one that we didn’t think we would face, and one we didn’t even particularly want, why, it’s even more of an opportunity. We can bring ingenuity to this crisis, and we can understand it as a challenge, and we can show that it’s precisely when we are down, as a people, as a nation, as a species, that we find in ourselves the strongest urge to equip ourselves and to prevail. We can right the craft, we can move into the deeper water, we can ride out the swells. It’s just a microorganism. We can educate people. We can treat people. We can beat the bug. And we can emerge from this combat a leaner, more responsive federal government, whose agencies know how to deal with the worst that the contemporary moment can bring us.”
Gibraltar turned to face one of the cameras in the corner of the room as he completed his remarks. If the meeting was to be a sequence of turf wars, a bunch of guys flexing their muscles, nothing more, he was going to set the agenda.
“Very nice,” said the fellow from Central Intelligence, a late addition to the guest list, “and we agree with the moral principles just expressed, which are attractive, but what do we do with the unruly population in the borderlands while we try to contain the outbreak? How, for example, do we keep insurgent elements from exploiting the panic? Does the space administration, as lead agency, have any advice here?”
“Quarantine,” said the CDC, “as I’ve been saying, is really the only rational approach. Look at how, for example, the Ebola outbreaks have gone in Africa, how the problems with containment create security issues and economic ripples in the aftermath.”
“How to maintain a quarantine that we know has been breached? How are you going to protect the soldiers who are ordered to protect against escape?” said another voice. “There are problems that—”
“We believe there are kinds of antibiotics that will still be useful against this bacillus. After all, it has never been on Earth before, not in this strain.”
“New antibiotics in the pipeline every day, some very promising new medications, and the FDA is prepared to fast-track the—”
“And we have been monitoring housing stock in the Rio Blanco area, and we believe, because of the net loss in population in recent years, that there are plenty of available industrial lots that can be used as quarantine centers for treatment and/or detention.”
“Doesn’t that amount to domestic internment?”
“Depends on how you—”
“Gentlemen, could you try to—”
Gibraltar said, “From what I’ve heard the goal is to try to neutralize the already-infected, because—”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which was represented by the guy with the patch over one eye, had historical enmity with regard to Central Intelligence, even when the two of them seemed to agree on policy, and the man with the patch, while gulping down the last of his mint julep, hotly suggested, “A fence can be used as an outflow valve. We build a temporary perimeter around the north end of the city. Uh, could you please plug this drive in here? Bring up the first map? Obliged. Now, as you can see from the data we’ve collected, on the north the city is bounded by mountains here, easily policed, and it might be possible, on the far side of the range, to quietly erect a perimeter that will effectively create a no-man’s-land of the sort that was used after that reactor accident in—”